IT'S all happening to Ali MacGraw, and it's happening all at once. Until lately, her world had been Manhattan's jungle of models and photographers, boutiques and private discothèques. Now, at 30, her first film role, as Brenda Patimkin in Goodbye, Columbus, has made her the latest heir apparent in a domain that is just as fickle. "I always had a wish, way in the back of my head, that it would happen," Ali says, "but I did nothing about it. You don't do what you don't have to."
The language is that of a Scott Fitzgerald heroine, and rightly so. Ali (a childhood abbreviation of Alice) is a reasonable facsimile of Judy Jones in Winter Dreams, whose mouth gave a "continual impression of flux, of intense life, of passionate vitality—balanced only partially by the sad luxury of her eyes." Even more, she seems to be playing some endless version of Gatsby's Daisy, whose voice had "a singing compulsion, a whispered 'Listen,' a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour."
Rightest Kind. Fitzgerald—not coincidentally, one of her favorite authors —surely could have written her biography. Born into a middle-class family in Pound Ridge, N.Y., she had most of the right things: "artist parents," an education on scholarship at Rosemary Hall and Wellesley, a job as an editorial assistant to Diana Vreeland on Harper's Bazaar, even marriage to a good-looking Harvard grad. The marriage went nowhere for two years, then ended in a quiet divorce. "He was a nice guy," she says now. "We just had nothing in common. Nothing."
Ali meanwhile had managed the rightest kind of job as an assistant to Fashion Photographer Melvin Sokolsky. "He'd seen me at Bazaar," she recalls, "and offered me $100 a week, twice what I was making. I was married then, and needed the money. Before I left, Diana Vreeland warned me, 'You can't leave now. You don't know enough.' " But Ali learns quickly, and she soon made herself a permanent studio fixture. She did everything: made up the models, adjusted the lighting, hunted for an endless variety of photographer's props all over New York. "I think I must know where to get just about anything in the world," she says.
During her six-year stay with Sokolsky, Ali also picked up an occasional assignment in front of the camera. Her open face and broad shoulders kept her from high fashion, but she was the suburban stereotype, one of those "young mamas" who reads Redbook and shops at Peck & Peck. She brought to modeling the same qualities that have made her a star: a combination of controlled, countrified chic and hip innocence that types her as that kind of smart, pretty, unapproachable girl who sat in the back row of the sophomore poetry seminar.